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Monday, September 27, 2010

Cata Build 13033: Gear and Bugs

The last beta patch had a lot of changes for moonkin that were for the most part well received by the community. Therefore, it is not surprising that Build 13033 doesn't have a lot of big changes for moonkin to discuss. However, there are a few things you may be interested in and that I want to talk about.

Tier 11 Gear:

Stat

Chest

Head

Legs

Shoulders

Hands

Total

Intelligence

301

281

301

233

233

1349

Stamina

512

512

512

380

380

2296

Hit Rating/Spirit

0

0

0

0

0

0

Crit Rating

198

228

0

0

169

595

Haste Rating

0

168

228

149

149

694

Mastery Rating

218

0

188

169

0

575

Gem Socket

Yellow

Meta

Red

Yellow

Red

1M, 2R, 2Y

Socket Bonus

20 Int

30 Int

20 Int

10 Int

10 Crit

80 Int, 10 Crit

Prior to this build, some feared our tier set would have Spirit or Hit on every piece, and that we would have a hard time getting rid of hit chance. That apparently shouldn't have been a big concern because none of our tier set has Hit or Spirit on it currently.

I must admit that I am a little shocked by this itemization. I always assumed that some of our tier set would not have Spirit or Hit on it, but I also assumed that two or three pieces would. Combine this with the fact that most of the Hit buffs have been removed from the game, and it's a little difficult to guess where we are going to get all of our Hit from. If we assume that Tier 11 bosses need 17% additional hit chance the way raid bosses typically do then we will need 1742 Hit Rating to hit cap. If we use the 4 piece set bonus, then that will have to come from 12 pieces of gear for an average of 145 hit per slot. Of course, some of that burden will be relieved by Reforging, Gems, and Enchants, but that is a large number to expect from 12 slots when most of them are "small" slots with less itemization.

Personally, I would like to see these stats altered a little bit to include more Hit Rating on 2 or 3 of the items. I think it will make gearing a little easier and less awkward as we advance to the next tier.

Two Piece Set Bonus: Increases the critical strike chance of your Insect Swarm and Moonfire spells by 5%.

I'm still a fan of the two piece set bonus. It may not seem like much but DoTs are a huge part of moonkin DPS at the moment. I plugged this change into my simulator and it resulted in a 1.66% DPS increase. That may not seem like much but it is a pretty good bonus for a two piece in the first tier of raiding.

Four Piece Set Bonus: Whenever Eclipse triggers, your critical strike chance with spells is increased by 99% for 8 sec. Each critical strike you achieve reduces that bonus by 33%,

I am still not a fan of the four piece set bonus. In my post two weeks ago, I talked about how the 8 second duration of the buff was too short. That is still an issue in my opinion, but I thought of a few other questions as well.

How are DoTs impacted by this set bonus? If they are impacted, will they hold the buff for the duration of the DoT? Will DoTcrits reduce the bonus?

Our DoTs are two of our highest DPET spells. If they receive the 99% crit buff and hold it to duration without consuming any of the charges then this set bonus could be awesome. Conversely, if the DoTcrits consume the charges then this set bonus is likely to be horrible since individual DoT ticks are relatively small.

It will be hard to get a definitive read on this Set Bonus until we can test it in game, but I am not getting a good feeling from it. If it only impacts Nukes, then the duration is way to short, and kind of pointless since it also has charges. If it does impact DoTs it could be awesome if the DoTs hold the buff for the duration, but that sounds very unlikely to me. What seems more likely is that the DoTs will consume the charges, and severely limit the effectiveness of the bonus.

The bright side is that this set bonus could be so bad that we don't care about it and we have two more item slots to pick up Hit Rating.

Documented Changes:

Wild Mushroom now affects targets within 3 yards, down from 10 yards.

Wild Mushrooms now hit very hard, and a 10 yard radius was probably to large, but a 3 yard radius feels too small. First off, it is a 91% reduction in the area affected. That means you have to place them fairly precisely to get the maximum impact. Second, they are fairly complicated to cast. You have to place each Mushroom individually, and where you want to place them is likely a high traffic area. This means it's probably going to take significant time just to place them if you know where they need to go, and then you need to push a button to detonate them.

Wild Mushroom may be very strong but I'm not sure it's cost effective given their range and the complexity of the cast. It looks to me like there is a lot of potential for error at the moment.

Entangling Roots now lasts 30 sec, up from 27 sec.

A lot of moonkin have been laughing at this change. My guess this is another CC standardization change, but I don't know for sure. That said, I haven't used Entangling Roots in a while, but I don't remember them ever lasting the full duration even when I wasn't hitting the target. Unless the roots are a little more resilient then I remember, this change does seem a little silly.

Undocumented Changes:

I haven't had a chance to test the most recent beta build yet, but this is what I've heard from various forums and such.

Moonfire and Insect Swarm now scale with Haste. Moonfire is also still a 2 second tick.

I was beginning to have my doubts that MoonkinDoTs would scale with Haste Rating, but I am glad to hear that they do now. DoTs are such a large portion of our DPS, I wouldn't want them to not scale with any stat. Also, it sets Haste apart from Crit and Mastery in terms of value. It was beginning to look like it wouldn't really matter how we geared as long as we were hit capped and had the highest ilevel possible. That would have been no fun at all.

21 comments:

Titnichal
said...

I'm not sure if it's just something associated with beta (or target dummies), but as of two or three days ago, roots are not being broken by dots, nukes, or anything we cast at them on beta. If this holds true, it could make entangling roots a very powerful CC tool, possibly even making up even for starsurge losing its knockback.

From what I gathered there won' t be any non spirit leather. With our talent spirit > hit we will get most of our main hit from offset pieces. If we need anymore then we will end up reforging or gemming for it.

Converting some of the stats on the current tier to hit is a bad move. Eventually we end up with TOO much hit and reforging only allows a certain percentage of the stats to be changed then we get stuck with all that useless hit.

@Moonlyt - I was mostly talking about that the tier pieces shouldn't have it because we may end up with too much hit then we can only reforge a percentage of the hit if it was on tier pieces. Coupled with all spirit offset pieces we end up having to reforge down for instead of up for hit.

The Druids on the TMR thread explained it better than me but it is best that we don't have hit on tier pieces.

Where are you getting the 153.645 number? You're the only person I've seen use that number. Everyone else from EJ SimulationCraft and other Theorycrafters are using a 102.471 = 1%.

@Lavarinth, Dillybear, and everyone else who uses the "everything else will have spirit" arguement.

You guys haven't done the math or thought this through. We have 17 item slots. Five of those are covered by tier gear but we only need four for the set bonus. That means we have 13 slots to get hit from. That means we need an average of 134 hit from each slot including weapon and offhand. That is definately do able, but we will need Spirit or Hit in almost every slot.

You guys are taking that we will have spirit in every slot as a given but it's not. Sure, our non tier leather will likely have spirit on it, but that is only 4 our of 13 slots. We still have Rings, Trinkets, a Neck, a Back, an Off-hand, a Weapon, and a Relic. While we can get spirit/hit from any of those it's not a given, and not having Spirit/Hit on our tier gear limits our options in these sockets that aren't guarenteed to have spirit.

It must be wrong though. In either case I agree with you. I'm pretty sure we will be raiding with a mixture of blues and epics at first. This probably means that we will be reforging stats on our tier gear to spirit as well as having to have spirit on all other 13 pieces.

I guess that is what reforging is for, I just hope it's enough to allow us choice when it comes to non-tier gear.

After reading your post on TMR and here about the lack of spirit on our tier I was curious if our base spirit is counted towards hit rating as well. There is nothing in the talent calculators to say otherwise.

Between enchants, gems, and reforging I don't think hit cap will be terrible to reach. Blue gear (ilvl 364) has spirit/hit rating ranging from 112 to 202, and each piece with a socket. We can most likely assume that starter gems will provide around 20-30 of a stat based on the available socket bonuses. If the pattern holds that hit cap is one of the most important stats to cap early, then this first tier of raiding gear will merely be a return to times when we would need hit (or possibly spirit in this case) gems in our gear. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a key trinket or two ala the Mark of the War Prisoner or Shard of the Crystal Heart which provide a huge bulk of the hit needed as well.

I'm more worried about what ridiculous loot impositions will be put on us this time around. I can already hear the healers yelling "no you can't take the gear with +spirit you're dps" while the mages yell "no you can't take the gear with +hit you should wait for +spirit it works the same". At least for the leather slots the debate will pretty much only be between Druids which is an improvement over the past, but it may have been made worse for all the other slots.

@Graylo - I understand where you are coming from. I believe you are thinking that we won't be able to hit the cap without reforging and gemming massively and I agree with you on that to an extent. Based on just spirit gear from the offset slots (boots, etc) we would only be around 600 or so spirit.

However cloth casters will be also having the same problem from gear. From current gear it looks like most of the hit rating is also on cloth offset slots which is essentially our pieces that have spirit . While main slots (ie. chest, legs) have some hit rating it is only a few. Cloth users are going have to reforge also if they want to hit the cap too.

Now that may seem that cloth users will be having more hit however the Spirit to Hit Rating conversion ratio is not 1:1 in terms of stat value.

Now the only class is probably are Shadow Priests that will have no problem because of the spirit to hit talent and the ability to wear cloth and not sacrifice the armor bonus.

I believe that if they add Hit rating or spirit to our tier pieces we end up later on having too much and have much of it wasted since the reforge rate is 40% only. The scaling bosses will fix this issue but as upgrades come before the next tier we may end up requiring to reforge hit/spirit off once again.

For example - 1500 hit rating is our cap.

Side 1 - Tier 11 we our stuck at 1000 hit rating and need 500 more, we can reforge as much as we need more from crit/mastery/haste and then we have gems/enchants.

Side 2 - Tier 11 we our stuck at 2000 hit rating and we need to lose 500. We can reforge excess spirit/hit to crit/mastery/haste. However because of the reforge rate at 40% we only end up with 1800 because thats the lowest we are able to go.

Yes the numbers above are skewed however I will like you take into consideration that we may not be able to reforge all of the excess hit off. That is where I find the problem to lie. It may seem we won't ever have that issue since we are having a hard time capping, but it is one that I feel should be brought up.

So there are two sides to this. We can reforge up to meet the cap or we can reforge down to meet the cap. I believe blizzards take on this is to reforge up so we have to keep chasing the hit cap every tier.

First your math is wrong. If you reduce 2000 by 40% you end up with 1200, not 1800. You can still come down to your hypothetical 1500 number.

Second, the really hit cap is 1742. We would have to have 2903 hit rating to get to a place where we couldn't reforge enough hit off our gear. If you assume we have spirit or haste on all 17 pieces of gear then they would have to have an average of more then 171 spirit/hit per item to go past 2903 Hit rating. Judging from the gear released by MMO champion that is highly unlikely.

Third, there is absolutely no indication that every non tier item will have spirit or hit on it. We already know for a fact that there is a Ring and a Relic with Hit on it from MMO Champion.

It's clear that you don't understand my arguement. I'm sure we will be able to reach the hit cap with limited amounts of reforging, gems and enchants. My worry is that our gearing options will be limited, because we will be forced to look for hit/spirit on almost every item, because your non hit items have already been chosen for us because our tier gear was itemized without hit.

Besides, I'm not asking for hit on every item. All the cloth sets have 2 items with Hit on it. A having one tier item with hit on it would allow us to make more choices in our gear while still compensating for the fact that we are pretty much guarenteed to have Hit from the Boot, Belt, and Wrist slots, while the cloth casters are not guarenteed to get hit from those slots.

Graylo, I think you're blowing things out of the water. When gearing up for raids, and in the first teir of raiding, it is my understanding that you're meant to have to work for your hit cap. If they just gave it to you so easily then there wouldn't be a point in keeping it.

The reason that cloth casters get hit on their teir is because they won't be forced to take hit on their non-teir items. Shadow priests won't have a spirit-hit conversion; they take the same cloth as mages/locks.Because we are forced to take spirit in a few extra places, we aren't given any in our teir. This should keep us at the same point as the clothies - needing to work a little for the hit cap.

I'm sure that by t13 we'll be reaching our hit cap using only non-teir leather items, and perhaps a few gems. But frankly I'd be annoyed if I could reach my hit cap without having to worry about it at all in the first teir of raiding.

@ Graylo My 1800 number was reforging the "excess" 500 so 40% of 500 was 200 then subtracted that from 2000. I'm sorry I don't understand your argument even after reading your post on TMR too so I'll leave it at that.

Lets say for example you have 8 items each with 250 Spirit on them for a total of 2000 spirit and the hypothetical hit cap is 1500. Obviously you are 500 over the cap.

You're arguing you can only reforge 2 of the eight items taking 100 spirit off of each of them and being stuck at at 1800.

That is not the case. You still have 6 more items you can reforge to bring your spirit down. If you reforge three more of them down to 150 each you will be at the 1500 hit cap because you will have 3 items with 250 spirit each, and then 5 reforged items with only 150 spirit each.

@Graylo I thought about that after I posted my previous comment but you made it clearer..

The thing is that you can't reforge a specific amount and that it's only a set percentage.

I had figured if we end up with too much hit we wouldn't be able to go back down enough and ended with wasted hit which I have thought about and it wasn't exactly logical considering it's hard to cap perfectly on live already.

We know why there is no hit on our tier gear. If you remember back when they were talking about gear, they said that elemental and resto shamans would share gear and so would resto and balance druids. This makes sense as to why there is no hit or spirit on the tier pieces so that each spec can reforge according to the spec.

That is a bit weird...they always gave us hit on some tier pieces in Wrath (admittedly, they gave us too much, but dropping that to zero is a bit of an over correction).

Off the top of my head, perhaps they forgot that we no longer get big hit bonuses through talents when they itemized the tier 11 set? Or perhaps our numbers will be balanced around us not being hit capped...that would be weird though, and would likely result in hit being our most desirable stat at all times.

We still have a number of months to go before T11 is available, so I wouldn't take these numbers as gospel yet. Though I would get a chuckle if early boomkin raiding was better accomplished in the resto set than the balance...